A Freely Given Gift: An Interview with Jess Housty

The following interview is part three of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here).

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September - Jess Housty

We are in the time of radiant rot;
berries drop from the stems
when we shake them and salmon
eat up the daylight
as their flesh falls away from
their living bones.

We can feel the full weight
of our grief now
as everything that surrounds us
is shot through with final gold
and the world lays down its work
to rest.

The stillness is like a fresh layer
of humus on the ground.

We are hushed
as though we’ve entered a house
where someone is dying:
we hear nothing but the thuds of crab apples
falling into the yellowed grass.

Reprinted with permission

from Crushed Wild Mint

(Nightwood Editions, 2023)

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Jess Housty (‘Cúagilákv) is a parent, writer and grassroots activist with Heiltsuk (Indigenous) and mixed settler ancestry. They serve their community as an herbalist and land-based educator alongside broader work in the non-profit and philanthropic sectors. They are inspired and guided by relationships with the homelands, their extended family, and their non-human kin, and they are committed to raising their children in a similar framework of kinship and land love. They reside and thrive in their unceded ancestral territory in the community of Bella Bella, BC.

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Rob Taylor: The opening poems in Crushed Wild Mint establish parallels between prayer, ceremony and poetry. For instance, from “Nearshore Prayer” (one of four poems in the book with “prayer” in their title):

This is a prayer that extends

in the direction of the ocean:

it is not a story; nothing 

is apocryphal in prayer 

Do you consider poetry to be a form of prayer? A poetry book a form of ceremony?

Jess Housty: I get teased sometimes for how often I talk about prayer. I’m not a religious person. For me, prayer is the word I use to describe moments of meditation and communion that ground me in myself and the world around me. In that sense, absolutely—each poem is a prayer, regardless of the title! Because each poem depends on beings and places and ideas outside of myself, and so each poem is relational and connective. I hope that, taken together, they feel like a ceremony or practice grounded in communal blessing, curiosity, and thanksgiving.

RT: Yes, that’s so well put. I think of poetry books as spaces of (usually non-religious) communion, though we rarely talk about them as such. Connected to this, in “Bowing to Yarrow (1),” you write about “the directionality of prayer,” which “is moving all around us and through time,” so that a prayer given by an ancestor to a licorice fern or a cedar is returned to you anew by the plant in the present day. 

I think something similar about poems—that they are not simply given to the reader by the writer, but co-created with the reader, then they are passed on to others and the process begins again. What is given is always traveling out and returning. I’m curious, now that Crushed Wild Mint has been published, how you think of your poems moving through the world. What is their directionality? How do you hope they might come back to you, or the generations that follow?

JH: I love this. I learn different complexities of my own poems when they’re reflected back to me by readers who are generous enough to share with me what they felt when they read my words. People who take in Crushed Wild Mint from a distance pull out themes and ideas I can’t always easily see when I’m so close to my own writing. The most surprising part of offering a book to the world is realizing that there is no final iteration—there’s always a chance that the light will refract in some unexpected way for someone, or that a new echo will bounce off the walls of the valley causing me to see and hear and feel my own words in a deeper way. I’ve had to learn to be comfortable knowing that I can’t control how my writing lives in the imaginations of others and to trust that this brings unpredictable nuance and richness to the practice of poetry. When I take a deep breath and trust that the world will be tender, it feels incredibly liberating to think of poems as conversations.

RT: Poems as conversations in a tender world—yes, that feeling is very present in your work, perhaps no more so than in your poems about/for your Gwani (Granny). You thank her at the end of Crushed Wild Mint for “the peace of rewriting poems while you napped beside me in sunshine,” which is just about the most lovely thing I’ve ever read in an acknowledgments page.

In “Luáɫ” you write about the different poems you would compose in different rooms of your Gwani’s house, and in a later poem you note that, after she died, “the land… stopped speaking to me.” Could you talk a little about your Gwani? How do you think she shaped your relationship to poetry, and the poems themselves?

JH: My Gwani was the embodiment of nurturing love. She raised and loved four generations of descendants before she passed, and I think all of us would say the same thing: she made us feel safe and held and nourished. In the last years of her life, my family cared for her at home around the clock, and in my shifts with her I got to witness her softening into our care and shifting our sense of time to become nonlinear as she began to slip mentally into her girlhood again. Loving her and taking care of her was an exercise in being present and grounded in a reality I couldn’t direct or control, and it required trust and curiosity that became a practice extending far beyond elder care. I wrote or edited much of Crushed Wild Mint sitting beside her and she anchored me and my words in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until after she was gone.

RT: As someone who has a parent living with dementia, I’m very moved by your description of the illness as “slip[ping]… into her girlhood again.” My mother, who has forgotten so much of her life, is also always discovering things anew, and there’s joy mixed in there with the loss. 

The acts of living with a person with dementia and of writing a poetry book both cause us to think a great deal about memory: what we can hold on to, and what we have to let go of. When you wrote poems beside your napping Gwani, you were engaging with both at once, which may in part explain why the final word in Crushed Wild Mint is “memory.” What did your time writing poems in the sunshine teach you about memory?

JH: I come from a culture where our knowledge systems, storykeeping, and historical records are passed down orally and held collectively. Some of the ideas and knowledge embedded in Crushed Wild Mint felt like a remembering from outside myself. So in some senses, it feels very normal for memory to be fluid and collaborative. Gwani illuminated this for me. Witnessing her showing up authentically as so many phases of herself—and being witnessed by her in so many forms of my own, from grandchild to stranger to someone she simply called “auntie”—made me realize that how we experience ourselves and one another is deeply dynamic, and so of course memory and the stories we tell are dynamic too. And because memory thrives on witnessing, it binds us in a shared experience.

RT: I was angered when I read your poem, “To the scientist who called my beloved salmonberries “insipid.”” This was both due to what the scientist said and the fact that their words caused a (thankfully temporary) rupture between you and my very favourite berry on earth. It made me think about how disconnected many of us on the West Coast are from the plants that surround us. People are often surprised to see me eating salmonberries or huckleberries when out on a walk—they didn’t know you could do that—and sometimes those people have lived here their whole lives! And I am sure I stroll ignorantly past many other plants that could benefit me greatly.

Your book teems with local plant life, with poems dedicated to yarrow, wild crab apples, bog cranberries, salal, wild aster, skuusiid (an endemic variety of potato) and, of course, the titular wild mint. It feels a bit like you’re writing an alternate field guide in response to that scientist—one designed to induce love and curiosity instead of shame. Would you say that’s true? 

JH: Plants bring me incredible joy. They nourish and heal. They signal and indicate. They put tools in my hands and structure in my seasons. It brings me great comfort to know that I can walk out into the wilderness of my motherlands and know that I’ll be fed, that I’ll be able to tend to my ills, that what I need most will be provided in exchange for the care I return to what surrounds me. Plants are the reason trust is such a fundamental presence in my life. My grandparents (and my ancestors) knew plants were our relatives, and that kinship engendered a lot of fierce mutual love and care. I was raised with that knowledge too. The only time I’ve ever doubted it is when I listened to people who think we are apart from nature, and that this distance somehow elevates us morally above everything around us. How preposterous! I wanted to infuse Crushed Wild Mint with all the bursting berries and bitter, potent medicines that help me thrive. I wanted to insist on them. I don’t think I could ever tolerate them being diminished to me again.

RT: In what ways would you like readers to think more deeply about their relationship with the plant life around them?   

JH: I hope readers become curious about the personalities of yarrow, licorice fern, and every other relative nestled in the book. And I hope that curiosity becomes an invitation into joy.

RT: This book is so intimately bound to the plants—and also the land, language, and animals—of the Haíłzaqv (Heiltsuk) territory in and around Bella Bella that it seems impossible to imagine it being written anywhere else. What do you think your poems would look like if you’d written them in a big city, or simply far from Haíłzaqv territory? Would you be writing poems at all?

JH: I’ve wondered about this. Looking back at my life, the quietest periods—when I’ve felt like I had no stories to tell—were when I lived in urban places, or when I was traveling in other parts of the world. I know my motherlands deeply enough that we can speak to one another, and those conversations often seed stories and poems. I admire people who can ground themselves anywhere and speak those places into the world. I don’t think I’m one of them—and I am learning to love being hyperlocal and in relationship with what surrounds me and holds me close.

RT: The last section of the book is devoted to the story of a historical y̓úzua (flood), and the two mountains, M̓ṇsǧṃx̌λi (Mount Merritt) and Q̓aǧṃi (Mount Keyes) that nearly drowned in it. While the poems look backwards in this way, I couldn’t help but feel that they were also looking forward towards a future of rising sea levels and floods. “How did we miss the signs / of a multiplied disaster?” you write in “Remembering the Flood,” and you seem to be speaking of the past and the present/future at once. How did the looming presence of our oncoming “multiplied disaster” shape your writing about the natural world in Crush Wild Mint? Did it add an urgency to the composition of your poems? A sadness? A sharper appreciation?

JH: My climate grief is so raw. My identity and my ability to thrive are intimately and inextricably tied to my motherland and her thriving. I know, and I repeat through the stories and teachings we hold collectively as Heiltsuk people, that my ancestors have rooted themselves in a practice of resilience and mutual care for places and non-human kin. Through this resilience I have been able to inherit this beautiful world for a moment and then reach down to place that inheritance on my own children. But what am I handing down? Reflecting on the crises we know our people have survived historically does give me strength as I brace myself against a rapidly changing world. But the world is threatened precisely because there are people who don’t believe in that practice of resilience, who hold themselves apart from and above the clean air and fresh water and thriving systems that make me who I am. I need them to feel connected too.

RT: A tall task, but yes, very much one you take on in Crushed Wild Mint. Your poems on the y̓úzua frequently speak of resilience: “we are mountains / that help other mountains / withstand the flood.” What role do you think poetry plays in building our resilience against the flood?

JH: When I think of the poetry that resonates with me the most as a reader, it’s the poems that seem to place their hands on either side of my face, look me in the eye, and say this is who you are. I think it’s possible that poetry and art can help us get out of our own way, to shake off the dissociation of modern existence and get comfortable with the hard work of feeling. Speaking for myself, I have a deep desire to be of service and to be an agent of generosity and care and reciprocity, but sometimes I feel stuck. Sometimes I need the truth to be illuminated and for a shock to be delivered to my system to bring me to life so I can feel and do. It’s easy to feel stuck, but there’s no time. We’re needed. All of us. And I think poetry can help to wake us up.

RT: On the theme of awakenings, in your book’s acknowledgments you thank “Jerry, my Dutch uncle, for being the first one to believe I was a poet.” We all need a “Jerry” in our lives! Could you talk about the process of coming to see yourself as a poet? What did Jerry see in you that you perhaps did not yet see in yourself? 

JH: My Uncle Jer has been telling me I was a poet since I was a small child seeing ecosystems in flooded ditches and finding wonder in every stone on the riverbank in Clatse Bay. It was years before I actually put a pen to paper to write a poem. What I value most about how I’m able to thrive in my motherlands is the deep sense I have of being grounded in place, and in relationship to the places and the non-human kin that surround me. I think that poetry, in some ways, is an act of witnessing and then externalizing what you’ve witnessed. And if there’s one thing Uncle Jer and others might have seen in me before I recognized it in myself, it’s the deep joy I find in being present and witnessing the world around me (and feeling seen and witnessed in return).

RT: Many of your poems directly address, or instruct, the reader. In this, and in their invocations to pay better attention to the natural world, they reminded me of much of Mary Oliver’s work, especially her most popular poems such as “Wild Geese.” Your writing also brought to my mind the work of poets such as Wanda John-Kehewin and Selina Boan. Those connections may only be present in my mind, of course! Which poets were the greatest inspirations for you as you were writing the poems in Crushed Wild Mint?

JH: I think if someone ever felt a reason to imagine my writing in any proximity to Mary Oliver’s, I might believe I’ve peaked as a writer! Her poetry teaches me about clarity and devotion, and her words are what I turn toward when I need to be reminded that I am grounded forever in the wildness that surrounds me. I also reach for Joy Harjo for poetry that holds its chin up high and speaks from a universally gorgeous and unapologetically Indigenous worldview. When I think about Crushed Wild Mint, I also feel like I need to acknowledge the vitality and magic realism of Eden Robinson’s writing. Being a reader has shaped me as a writer in ways I couldn’t even begin to untangle, and inspired me to ask myself over and over again with each new text that I encounter, Who can I be in conversation with you?

RT: Near the end of the book, you write “the gift economies of mountains / make us into bridges between peaks.” I was struck by how you brought the idea of a gift economy into the book in that way. I’ve long thought of poets as living and working primarily in the gift economy, in ways not unlike the lives of spiritual and religious leaders (Robert Hass points to the nineteenth century tradition of gift showers for ministers when they would arrive in a new town). This very much feels in keeping with how I sense you’d like your poems to be received by the world. How do you see the relationship between the gift value of a poem and the exchange/market value of a poem (especially as you’re now out promoting a product for sale)?

JH: I grew up in a cultural context where a person’s wealth is measured less by what they accumulate and more by how many people they’re able to take care of. The richest people are the ones who have given everything away—who had the privilege of caring for others and who had others in their life to care for. It feels to me that I have a responsibility to share anything I create or possess, and to do so generously. I can do this trusting that others will also take care of me. So yes, it feels spectacularly weird to bring in a commercial element! What feels true for me is that I’d share my writing freely with anyone who wanted to read it, but the book as an object is a vehicle to share my poetry more widely, and to keep my lights on while I try to create more gifts to share. In the same way, I never take money for plant medicines that I prepare, but sometimes people choose to pay me for the jar or the vial that contains the medicine even as they accept the medicine itself as a freely given gift.

The Sponsoring Condition: An Interview with Matt Rader

An excerpt from this interview was first published in the Fall 2022 issue of Arc Poetry Magazine.

Lightwell – Matt Rader

The morning after you

left, the sun

was a dim white light

that didn’t make me 

think of anything,

not angels,

not death. I couldn’t

look directly

at it

but its effects

were everywhere:

the swarm of raindrops

alive in the lilac,

the metallic skyscape

floating

in my truck’s silver paint.

A brightness too bright

to look at

is the true definition

of a thing

beyond me, a white hole

I fall endlessly through

into my body.

Woe, to see the sun,

someone once wrote,

and not think 

of angels,

but I’d like to 

not think

at all, if possible. Just feel

something cosmic

reach through the altostratus

and touch me.

from Ghosthawk 

(Nightwood Editions, 2021).

Reprinted with permission.

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Matt Rader is an award-winning author of five volumes of poetry, a book of non-fiction, Visual Inspection, and a collection of stories, What I Want to Tell Goes Like This. His work has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Geist, The Walrus, Wales Arts Review, The Fiddlehead and The Malahat Review. Rader is a core member of the Department of Creative Studies at UBC Okanagan where he lectures in creative writing. He lives on the traditional and unceded land of the syilx/Okanagan people in Kelowna, BC.

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Rob Taylor: In reading Ghosthawk (Nightwood Editions, 2021), I was reminded of your second collection, 2008's Living Things, which opened with a poem whose form immediately grabs your attention, "The Great Leap Forward.” It’s still the only poem I've read modeled after the Fibonacci sequence! As Living Things' title suggests, in that book you focused your attention on the natural world. Here you are thirteen years later with another bold formal choice: almost all of Ghosthawk is composed of haiku-like tercets, with the majority of the poems being exactly eleven tercets long. And the plants and animals of the Okanagan anchor many of them. 

Formally and thematically, then, Ghosthawk feels like both a "leap forward" and a circling back to your enduring themes and concerns. Would you agree with that? How do you place this book in relation to those that came before it?

 

Ghosthawk (2021)

Matt Rader: I’ve lived most of my life outside of large urban centers. I come from families of European settlers.  It’s challenging to write about where you are if you don’t have words for what’s around you. Mostly, what’s been around me have been plants, mountains, water, sky.

 

In 2014 I moved with my family to the Okanagan Valley, 400 kms from the sea. Semi-arid brush steppe. Grasslands and ponderosa pines. Prickly-pear cactus and sagebrush. I’d never lived that far away from the sea. I didn’t know where I was, not really.

 

Ghosthawk is a recapitulation of a method for poem-making and home-making that I first practiced most ardently in Living Things. In both books, the imposed structures of form, whether received or invented, helped focus my attention so my awareness might grow.

 

The naming of the natural world worked the same way: by learning names for plants I attended to them and became aware of the communities in which they lived. It’s important to know your neighbours and whose home you’ve come to live in.

 

RT: You attend to the natural world both by naming and seeing it. In Visual Inspection (Nightwood Editions, 2019), your book of experimental essays on chronic pain, you write, "sometimes searching for something guarantees you'll never find it. Sometimes what you are looking for obscures what it is you find in your search; you have to see not what you're looking for, but what is there." 

When I read that, my mind leapt to the poems in Ghosthawk, published two years later, which very much seem to be born from seeing "what is there." How did your thinking in Visual Inspection manifest in the poems of Ghosthawk? 

 

MR: I started writing Ghosthawk before Visual Inspection, so to some degree Ghosthawk informed Visual Inspection as much as the other way around, perhaps more.

 

RT: It makes a lot of sense that these two books were born out of the same time in your life. How do you think your chronic pain has influenced the way you "look" at the world in your poems?

 

MR: Pain is very difficult to speak about except in symbols, metaphors, and analogies. It reminds me of poetry: the best poems can’t be paraphrased because how they say what they say is, to be tautological, what they say.

 

Seeing “what is there” isn’t an objective action but an ethic of clarity based in humility. Sometimes you see the bitterroot making its star-shape laser-rays on the dry steppe. Sometimes you see, as Stevens has it, the “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Or what I might call the fantasy and the mystery.

 

The vision of the bitterroot is a mystery not a fantasy. That’s the important part. Trust Louis MacNeice to say it plainly: “But dream was dream and love was love and what / Happened happened—even if the judge said / It should have been otherwise.”

 

RT: There's a powerful moment in Visual Inspection where you talk about pain and belief: how others, and even ourselves, don't believe or sympathise with pain until it's diagnosed, named and measured in a medical context. But pain, at its core, is unnameable, unmeasurable. As you put it, "speaking about [pain] in medical terms often does more to undermine personal experience than to illuminate it." You then talk about the joy of having a friend, also living with chronic pain, who simply believes in your pain without needing you to prove it/name it.

 

Could you talk a little more about the connection between your challenges in communicating your physical pain to those around you, and your challenges in communicating your inner self in your poems? 

 

MR: To some degree, I don’t know that pain or poetry can be communicated much at all except through experience. Anyone who reads poetry for years will have the experience of a poem they read twenty years previous suddenly feeling like an entirely different poem even though the words are, obviously, exactly the same.

 

One can learn to communicate pain in limited ways within the contexts of particular relationships because within those relationships one can make use of shared symbols, shared signposts of language that indicate a familiar location within that relationship.

 

Mostly though, writing poems and communicating pain is like saying, “Look, a red thimbleberry.” Some folks will not be moved. Some folks will look at it with curiosity. Some will eat it.

RT: Ha! Yes, the releasing of control over how your work is interpreted is a valuable lesson for writers, applicable to many other aspects of life. A tension runs through Ghosthawk between the ephemeral (the aforementioned bitterroot, thimbleberry, etc.) and the eternal (the sun, the rain, the creek, etc.). You often show great affection for the living, but a distance from the never-ending: the sun "a brightness too bright / to look at," the rocks "pitiless solitude," the water with "nothing but the rush of itself to say," etc. Could you talk about this tension, and if you even see it as one? 

 

MR: This strikes me as a question of scale. None of the things you mention are actually eternal, as in “outside of time,” but appear—to me at least—to exist in time-scales that exceed humans in extravagant ways.

 

At a human scale, the table I’m writing on is solid, but physics tells us that at an atomic level it is mostly space and at a quantum level it isn’t even that. It’s easier for me to identify with the table as a table because the version of me that identifies at all is at the scale of tables. It might be the same with the rain and the mariposa lily.  

 

It’s an astute question though. The distance you note is interesting because I feel it most acutely when I “go inside” my own sensing mind-body. The brightness too bright to look at and the pitiless solitude and the aphasia of the self are all aspects of my attention-awareness when the part of me that can report back, the discreet user of language, is most dissolved or integrated with “what’s there.” In other words, the distance in the poem is an expression of the self as such.

 

RT: A favourite quote of mine is from Jim Harrison's poem, "Debtors": "Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?" Does that question resonate with you? Or perhaps its opposite: Would you love the creek more if you shared its scale and lasted (almost) forever?

 

MR: Love exceeds humans in extravagant ways, thankfully. I love the creek and would love the creek under any condition because that is part of what it means to love. As Auden says, “You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart,” and creeks, as the name suggests, are always crooked.

RT: A theme in Visual Inspection is adaptation to the crooked turns life throws at you. Looking back over your books, perhaps especially these six years between Desecrations and Ghosthawk, how have your expectations for the capacities of your own writing, or for writing in general, adjusted? 

 

MR: Yes, adjusting expectations until they aren’t expectations anymore at all but curiosities, possibilities, surprises, quiet revelations. A different orientation toward time, perhaps.

 

The insight for me, in the years writing Ghosthawk, was that the inner field of my imagination, my mind, was continuous with the field of wildflowers and the star fields. It’s an old insight; it’s nothing special, but it had a profound impact on me nonetheless. All the world in a grain of sand stuff.

 

There’s that old Buddhist wisdom that goes something like: Before I practiced the mountains were only mountains. After I started practicing the mountains were no longer mountains. Now, after long practice, the mountains are mountains again. 

 

I’m not a Buddhist though. I don’t have a particular spiritual framework guiding me, though I was raised in, and had my imagination shaped by, a very liberal Catholic theology that feels kinship with Eastern practices. 

I’ve always been so curious about what I’ll think if I’m lucky enough to grow old.

 

RT: A Buddhist sensibility is certainly present in Ghosthawk, as is the haiku form. The poems in the book, which pay deep attention to the natural world, are composed of haiku-like tercets. But these poems aren't haiku: they are longer and roam widely, drawing in more connections.

The opening words in Ghosthawk, from the book's epigraph, are "Reading Bashō..." Could you talk about what you took from reading haiku poets like Bashō, and how you applied it to your own work? Did you have any other sources of inspiration in settling on the book's form?

 

MR: At times, haiku feel to me like astute snippets of reportage, ones that note not only the physical environment but the psycho-social state that accompanies each moment of observation. There’s a kind of selfless objectivity in Bashō’s poems characterized by good humour, clarity, and care. This feels to me like one of the highest ethics not just in poetry, but as a human. 

 

Western poets have been taking cues from this technique for a few generations now: the image as a device for simultaneously collapsing and expanding space-time. However, Westerners, generally speaking, are more interested in the effects than the ethics of a technique. Not just in poetry but in everything. There’s a cost to the magic of collapsing space-time that must be paid. Bashō’s selflessness is part of that payment.

 

But Bashō wasn’t really the model for these poems, more like a fellow traveler I’ve met at points along the way. My guide was Seamus Heaney’s long poem “Squarings” where he asks “could you reconcile / what was diaphanous there with what was massive?”

 

RT: Can you tell me more about “Squarings” and how it came to guide you in writing Ghosthawk?

MR: “Squarings” is a long poem in four sections with multiple parts that concludes (with the exception of an epilogue translation from The Inferno) Heaney’s 1991 collection Seeing Things. It’s a book and a poem that has continued to unfold for me over more than two decades of repeated reading. “Squarings” is arguably the apotheosis of Heaney’s poetic vision.

The poems of Seeing Things were composed in Heaney’s middle life after the loss of both parents. The 1993 ceasefire in Northern Ireland was on the historical horizon. The fall of the Communist block had just taken place. Mythological times both world-historically and personally. 

“Squarings” is formally iterative. Each part is four tercets of roughly five beats a line. In other words, they’re squares. The lines make a kind of grid through which Heaney looks at his world and what’s beyond his world, what’s beyond the Earthly world. 

The poem gathers up themes, ideas, references, and foreshadowings from the first part of the book but also from his earlier work. It’s self-consciously literary. Heaney puts himself in a lineage that rocks between the clear-eyed atheism of Thomas Hardy and the spiritual curiosity of W. B. Yeats. The poem is very much about “seeing” in both a literal and a metaphysical sense. It has an airy, ethereal quality even when regarding the “stony up-againstness.” 

I’d had my own mythological encounters with death before and during the composition of Ghosthawk. When I found my own auger-like tercet shape, I determined to keep working it until I found water. And then work it over and over. 

RT: I love that idea of finding your auger: how these shapes hold power, allowing us to move more deeply into subjects that are difficult to approach.  In Visual Inspection, you write, "When we see a printed haiku by Bashō we immediately, before reading a word, apprehend something different than when we see the first page of a blank-verse epic like Paradise Lost." You then follow this with blacked-out versions of each, proving your point. 

This reminded me of something Ken Babstock once said about the sonnet:

 

I am attracted to its no-holds challenge to composition. It says, “Here’s a squarish block of text on a white field in which something or, more likely, nothing will occur. Are you up to it?” It gets strange here as, obviously, there is no real “block of text” anywhere present before one writes a sonnet–except perhaps there is; a blast shadow from history, a kind of dimly perceived ‘dark matter’-sonnet that can serve as a vessel or threat or foil.

 

Could you talk a bit more about what you apprehend from the "blast shadow" of the haiku, which you turn into your “auger” in Ghosthawk? 

 

MR: For me, the shape of the haiku is an invitation, a doorway, a portal. It invites me to attend to relationship, between something and nothing, speech and silence, matter and dark matter (to borrow Ken’s metaphor), to remember that the smallest gestures radiate, and are defined by what they radiate into. Which itself is a common image in haiku.

  

Visual Inspection (2019)

RT: In Visual Inspection, you wonder about "how to create versions of our poems, or even compose poems, that render [the] extra-semantic dimensions available to the non-visual learner?" It's obvious that you think a great deal about how to visually present your poems on the page, but it seems equally important to you to expand non-visual accessibility to poems. Are these two desires unavoidably in conflict? Are there ways we can reach readers/listeners beyond the page while still maintaining a poem's "physical" presence?

 

MR: The appearance on the page is only one manifestation of the energy of a poem. Poems also exist as physical and mental speech. In these forms poems occupy different but equally true physical presences (Where in your head, for example, do you hear the poems you remember?). Poems can also exist as a kind of touch under the right conditions. Or as three-dimensional printouts. Or trees and grasses. Anything, really.

 

For me, the lesson of working on Visual Inspection was that no particular rendition of the poem needs to be definitive or given priority. That access isn’t a question of equal availability to all things for all people all the time, but rather a form of love characterized, as I said of Bashō, by good humour, clarity, and care. In this formulation there is no conflict created by difference.

 

The question for me as an artist isn’t how to expand non-visual access to poems, but rather how to expand my own aesthetic preferences, how to make art that imagines difference from the beginning. Rather than thinking about what non-visual folks don’t have access to and how I might deliver that access to them, I find it generative to think of how I might be in better relationship with my non-visual friends and families and how I might care for them.

 

I hope I’m getting better at imagining difference in general. I hope I’m getting better at bringing my own values in line with my actions both in and outside of writing. As Wallace Stevens says, “poetry is a violence within protecting us from a violence without.” I’ve not always lived up to “poetry.”

 

RT: What do you mean when you say you haven’t lived up to “poetry”? Do you mean outside of the writing, or within it?

MR: Both. Poetry for me has been a process of trying to find a way to be ever more honest—though a writer I admire told me that in an earlier draft of Ghosthawk I was still ducking saying what needed to be said. I don’t know if I agree with him but it was instructive for me about how even honesty and clarity look different from different positions. 

Within writing, I’ve at times not lived up to poetry by becoming too enamoured with my powers of description or my wielding of craft. I’ve not lived up to it when I’ve cared more for the performance than the audience, more for the praise than the simple truth. 

Outside of writing, my failure is more difficult to talk about because its ramifications are to particular people and relationships that didn’t agree to be put into print. I didn’t always understand that to my shame.

I’ve been thinking a lot in the past years about redress, restitution, and reconciliation. 

RT: The vices you laid out there in poetry (becoming too enamoured with one’s own powers, caring for the performance not the audience, seeking praise instead of truth) are too often the vices that lay us low outside of poetry, too. Perhaps that’s why both are lifelong pursuits, rarely mastered. Perhaps—and forgive me if I’m reaching wildly here—they’re the same pursuit.

MR: No, I don’t think that’s a wild reach. Often enough the obvious thing is the most important thing to say yet the thing left unsaid. So thank you for saying it. 

There are other grand vices with familiar names (racism, misogyny, colonialism, etc.) that amount to the same things: ego, will to power, fear. For me, “poetry” is one of the words for what stands against those vices, for what invites a human transcendence of our hurt and our hurting. It’s aspirational, an animating vision, even when the poem itself is about hurt and hurting. 

Great poems are to be lived with. They are inexhaustible. They are ongoing invitations to becoming. Which is why a Japanese maple is a poem, why a friendship is a poem, why birdsong is a poem. 

RT: Yes, let’s stick with this idea. Earlier you mentioned that a poem can be “trees and grasses. Anything, really.” In the acknowledgments to his new book of essays, The Tree Whisperer: Writing Poetry by Living in the World, Harold Rhenisch thanks you as the person who "saw the trees in my poetry and urged me to write this book." In what ways were Rhenisch’s poems trees? 

 

MR: What I recognized was the rhyme between Harold’s approach to fruit trees and his approach to composing poems. Harold taught me to care for fruit trees and poems by watching where the light falls. It is an invaluable lesson with ongoing ramifications for both my poems and my fruit trees. 

 

RT: Rhenisch writes so well about just that – making space for light in the orchard, and on the page. At one point in The Tree Whisperer he writes, "To use an intellectual tradition and the conceit of individual consciousness to speak of an Earth that is the body of all people who have touched the Earth is to lose the Earth." 

It feels to me that in your books there is an ongoing dance between intellectual traditions and “the Earth,” but which partner is leading the dance shifts from book to book (Ghosthawk, perhaps, being the book in which “The Earth” is most firmly in control). Would you say there's truth to that? How do you see your own work in relation to that quote from Harold?

 

MR: I think Harold’s correct and in this global historical moment that polemic is necessary. In a more philosophical mood I’d make one adjustment: "To use only an intellectual tradition and the conceit of individual consciousness to speak of an Earth that is the body of all people who have touched the Earth is to lose the Earth." The mind and the body are one and any tradition that denies this explicitly or implicitly summons trouble.

 

I think you’re also correct about my books. There’s a function of attention that feeds awareness and a function of awareness that directs attention. I don’t know if “The Earth” is most firmly in control of Ghosthawk, but it does seem to me that this book has a new sense of harmonics to it than in previous works. Harmonic being a word used, naturally, by music, physics and astrology.

RT: Could you speak a little more about this “new sense of harmonics” in Ghosthawk? 

MR: I’m thinking of Don McKay’s use of the term “rhyme” to describe the relationship of his poems about birdsong to actual birdsong. My good friend, the Tahltan artist Peter Morin, told me once that he liked the idea of me going out into the hills to eavesdrop on the flowers. I don’t mean to say that I can actually hear the flowers like I can hear birdsong, but I mean to say that I can actually hear flowers like I can hear birdsong. 

The process of making poems—at least the poems in Ghosthawk—isn’t burdened by questions of metaphysics, by what is and isn’t. The question of whether one can “truly” hear flowers is immaterial. What matters is that going out to listen to the flowers is different than going out to look at the flowers or pick the flowers or smell the flowers or pass them by. Intention matters. Openness matters. Attentiveness matters. This is what I mean by “harmonics.” 

 

RT: Though almost all of Ghosthawk is in tercets, the book's middle section features two ghazals, spread out one-stanza-per-page, with a longer poem between them (also spread out, in 10-line sections): three relatively short poems over 24 pages! I'm struck by how they speak to one another: the radif (refrain) of the first ghazal is "one" and the second is "gone," and between them you write "I'll never be able to say everything I want / to say, is what I want, finally, to say." 

There seems to be a disappearing here—someone sweeping their footprints behind them as they walk out of a room—as evidenced in part by the preponderance of white space on these pages (usually containing only a single couplet). Could you talk about that middle section: how you devised it and how you see it functioning as part of the larger book?

 

MR: I’m sensitive to some degree about claiming genre-forms like haiku and the ghazal for my poems. There’s a strong cultural argument against such claims. On the other hand, I certainly want to show the respect of acknowledging the influence these poetries have had on me. The ghazal appears to me to suggest something important about coherence and the primacy of the body, of form. The middle section is an experiment with that insight.

 

Conceptually, the middle part of Ghosthawk happens in the slackwater between in-breath and out-breath. Breathing is an important trope for me because I have had difficulties breathing my whole life. But breathing is also involuntary. In this sense it is pure form and each breath repeats the breath before. There’s a rhyme I think between that idea and the formal insights of the ghazal.

 

RT: Yes, absolutely. Moving forward while also circling back. And the quiet of that “slackwater.” The closing poems in Ghosthawk speak with increasing frequency of silence: "I'd like to / not think / at all, if possible," "The more I breathe,/ the less I have / to say // about the mariposa,”, "I was nothing once / I was happy." Do you see this book, with its white space and quietude, as a motion towards silence? Towards a return to happy nothingness? Do you see a time when you may stop writing books entirely?

 

MR: Writing poems is fun. As Mary Ruefle says, if you haven’t tasted the sweetness of writing poetry then you’re not writing poetry. It can be clarifying and ramifying and transformative. It can mystify and delight and console.

 

I see myself continuing to write poems in one form or another, but making books is another matter. At the very least, reflecting on my reasons for making books is important. Silence is not only one of the enduring themes of poetry but the sponsoring condition.

 

RT: If not books, then what? How would you find your way to readers? Or are readers (at least a wide audience of readers) of less importance to you now than in the past?

 

MR: What is a wide audience of readers for a Canadian poet in 2022? My relationship with readers is important to me, but that importance isn’t predicated on the size of my audience—it never has been for me. 

Books have acted like a psychological clearing house for my obsessions: publishing books has let me move on to the next set of problems and puzzles. But I’ve always felt that if I didn’t publish another book it was only because I was doing something more important to me. 

Living Things (2008)

RT: As naming and honouring sit so near the heart of Ghosthawk, I’d like to end our interview with a remembrance. A poem in the book, "Spring Azure," is dedicated to Elise Partridge and Patrick Lane, and I was struck in reading the back of Living Things to see blurbs by both Elise and Steven Heighton. Three meticulous poets and generous human beings, all lost to us too soon. My sense is that these three played distinct roles in your life - as friends, as teachers, as fellow poets on the page. Could you talk a little about these three, and the different ways poets have influenced your life and writing? 

 

MR: Patrick Lane was my first poetry teacher. Meeting him showed me that poets are living people, and that they could look and sound like the blue collar working class men I grew up with on northern Vancouver Island. Patrick was one model of what a poet might be and a very important one. There was wilderness inside Patrick that I recognized from my own life. Great love and great suffering, as the Franciscans say. He changed my life.

 

Elise was one of the most humble and private people I’ve ever known. In a sense that I think she’d object to out of modesty and embarrassment, she most resembles the ethic I ascribed to Bashō. She deserves a wider and ongoing readership. Elise once apologized to me because she felt that endorsement on Living Things wasn’t effusive enough. Anyone who knew Elise would recognize this as typical of her character. She passed on a wisdom about care as a poet and a person that I count among the greatest treasures I’ve received. 

 

Like Elise, Steve was a tremendous citizen of and for poetry. He was another kind of model: warm, serious, sincere, disarming, generous, not afraid to be goofy. He had a way of making everyone who knew him feel like they had a special connection with him because, I believe, they did. Steve seemed to have a heart the size of Lake Ontario. I feel his loss deeply. The possibility of seeing him again was something I cherished.

 

Maybe I can take this opportunity to send my love and regard to the families and loved ones of Patrick, Elise, and Steve. Thank you for loving our friends as you did so that they could be in our world as they were.

Listening For My Breath: An Interview with Délani Valin

The following interview is part one of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which I released between January and April 2023. All seven interviews were originally posted at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the fourth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here).

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Mrs. Clean

Yes, he cooks! He cleans!

He writes grocery lists!

But oh, how low

the bar is set.

I should be lucky,

after all most men

aren’t used

to scrubbing a toilet.

My husband’s muscles

bulge against the cotton

of his skin-tight bleached

t-shirt. I’m told he’s ideal

in every way. He won’t touch me

without wearing his yellow rubber

gloves. Yet he plucks hairballs

with bare hands from the neighbour’s

drain. I’ll spike his club soda

with lemon and Clorox. Watch

his bald ass Magic Erase that.

Reprinted with permission from 

Shapeshifters

(Nightwood Editions, 2022)

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Rob Taylor: The first third of Shapeshifters is devoted to persona poems, such as “Mrs. Clean.” It’s not until page 32 that we encounter a speaker who resembles some approximation of “Délani Valin.” In your acknowledgments, you thank poet Marilyn Bowering for “suggest[ing], during a time of deep struggle, that I play with different personas as a way to access different experiences.” How did persona poems help you better access the experiences you were struggling with?

Délani Valin: When I came to my writing instructor, Marilyn Bowering, I was in my early twenties and had been writing since I was a child. My problem was that over time, I felt my poetry had become one-dimensional. I was writing the same poem over and over, if I could write at all. In retrospect, I see that I had cornered myself into the narrow identity of Sad Person. I think this was protective: a Sad Person isn’t caught off guard by suffering—she suffers preemptively by numbing out all the time. Yet seeing this numbness reflected back to me again and again in my work didn’t provide me catharsis. I felt alienated from my work and from my body, like I was existing at arm’s length from my own life.

Marilyn assured me that my creativity hadn’t dried up, but that perhaps I needed another point of entry. She suggested writing from different perspectives and personas to avoid the trap of circling around the same poem (and pain) over and over. She gifted me Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife, which was really helpful. Duffy is so witty and I was enamored with the vibrancy in her work.

RT: Why did you choose to focus on corporate mascots?

DV: I grew up with corporate mascots invading everywhere from my school to my pantry and living room. They’re ubiquitous, and many a marketer has hijacked humanity’s gift for stories and fascination with archetypal characters in order to sell yet another variety of cereal. These corporate archetypes are Heroes and Maidens and Mothers. Yet, they’re devoid of agency. My experiment with them was an empathetic effort to imagine their inner lives distinct from the marketers who breathed them into being. But of course, I only substituted my own breath.

Marilyn’s advice about exploring topics through personas brought me closer to myself by opening up a wider breadth of possible expression. After trying on a multitude of masks, I was able to glimpse the grounded wearer at the centre of them all.

RT: In a sense, you pass that journey on to your readers: we access the biographical details of the “grounded wearer at the centre” by traveling first through the persona poems. Was it always important for you to put the persona poems at the beginning? What effect do you hope for that to have on your readers?

DV: This was an area in which Silas White and Emma Skagen at Nightwood Editions were indispensable. When I put together the manuscript, I was unsure about its shape. I thought about putting all of the poems in the exact order I wrote them so that maybe some progression would unfold, but they rattled against each other. I think that it was a case of me being too close to the material to pull back and make sense of it. Once I read it in the order Silas and Emma suggested, it clicked. The shape of the book mirrors the process I had undergone to access my own experiences. It’s like a map.

RT: The poem “Telogen Effluvium” sits, quite literally, at the centre of your book. Named after a hair-loss condition that can sometimes be triggered by psychological or emotional stress, the poem pushes close to discussing a traumatic event, but stops short. On exactly page 48 of a 96 page book, you write, “We just need to know the whole story. Ok, here it is,” but then the next section of the poem is a recipe for a hair mask, and we never fully circle back (though a poem later in the book fills in some details). The result gives a well-like shape to the book: poems stacked carefully around the edges of a dark centre.

I’m always interested in poems where the author is actively wrestling with something on the page (I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Write it!” in “One Art“). On the one hand these moments feel emotionally raw and honest, and on the other of course there is always some level of artifice: the poem, even if written in a moment of intensity, was edited and prepared for publication slowly over many months. Could you talk about “Telogen Effluvium,” both how it came to you and how you positioned it within the book?

DV: I wrote “Telogen Effluvium” six months after a traumatic event involving a sexual assault while I was visiting Cotonou, Benin in 2018. What’s interesting is that the other poem that deals more directly with the assault, “Magic Lessons,” was actually written while the event was unfolding and in the immediate aftermath.

They both deal with the circumstances differently. With “Magic Lessons,” my intention had been to write an extended letter to my partner in the form of a travelogue. (As an aside, Benin is an incredible country to visit.) But hell broke loose for me while I was there, and my poem necessarily took a turn.

When I got back from Benin, I was in a bit of a trance and related my story to others many times. I felt this urgency to be seen, to be witnessed. I wanted confirmation that I was still alive and still me. But this also led to me sharing more than was safe for me to do in some cases. Not everyone believed me about what happened, and nor did everyone have the space for my difficult story.

Therefore, when I wrote “Telogen Effluvium,” I was curious about how I could share my story while still protecting myself. I had already absorbed most of the truth of my situation, so I wanted to create a controlled experience where I could anticipate judgement, deflect, and pull back. If I circled around the truth enough, would it come through? Would it be more palatable?

RT: That’s so interesting, that you wrote more directly about the assault initially, but then circled back to a more cautious approach in “Telogen Effluvium.” And then made the choice to present them in the opposite order in the book, like something is being drawn out from you, when really you were reeling it back in. Could you talk a little about the form of “Magic Lessons,” with its six sections, each containing seven tercets, and its many repetitions?

DV: Because I was writing without the benefit of any temporal distance, I knew it was important that I ground the poem in form so that it wouldn’t spiral into a journal entry. The repeating lines served as an anchor, and finding some kind of “lesson” for each section of the poem was actually a helpful tool for meaning-making when the ground beneath me was crumbling at the time of the writing.

RT: It’s fascinating how form can drive meaning-making, pushing you to new and necessary places. “Magic Lessons” isn’t alone in doing this: poems in Shapeshifters are striking in their formal rigour. In addition to more traditional forms, such as glosas, haibun, prose poems, and set stanzaic forms, the book includes forms of your own invention.

One poem, “The Geologist,” is a formal tour de force: it features italicized lines which both can be read as part of the rest of the poem and as its own standalone poem. And if you pluck out the italicized lines, the remaining poem still works! I’ve never read anything quite like it. Could you talk about your interest in form? Does it function for you in some way like the persona poems, a path to access experiences that otherwise prove elusive?

DV: I think that’s right—form serves a similar function to the persona poems, in that forms give me a framework that I can explore and subvert. It also helps the writing stay playful for me. If I’m exploring a difficult personal topic, the form becomes a sort of puzzle. I know I have to hit certain lines or conclude a stanza in a specific way, so in a sense there is a right answer to my “poetry riddle.” It creates a bit of safe distance for me while making sure the writing process is fun.

I also do this in an attempt to care for the reader. It’s a deeply humbling experience when a reader says they connect with what I’ve written. But if what they’re relating to is a difficult experience or emotion, I want to do my best not to leave us both in that space. Pain is inevitable in life, but as someone who has complex trauma or Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD), I feel like it’s my responsibility to be mindful about transferring my particular trauma onto anyone else.

Some of the ways I try to do this are through form, narrative, strategic avoidance, being disciplined about which details I share, and, in some poems, through directly naming this intention. It’s an aspect of my writing that I want to keep developing.

RT: What a generous way to consider your readers, and an interesting way to think about form. One formal element you play with a lot, both in “Magic Lessons” and elsewhere, is long lines—so long they spill over to a second line when squeezed onto the printed page. In this they are reminiscent of poets such as Walt Whitman, Jorie Graham, and C. K. Williams. What inspired you to take on the writing of such long lines? How did long lines affect your sense of what you could say in your poems?

DV: I think the long lines come up for a few reasons. Sometimes it’s to try to capture the way I would tell a story orally—I’m listening for my breaths as I’m writing. Another reason is to give myself space. In conversation with others, it’s often when we stay on one subject just a beat too long that a surprising twist happens. Perhaps we’re discussing something political on a fairly surface level and someone starts to say, “Well, anyway…” but if we stay on the subject just a touch longer, we might discover that they were pivoting because things were actually getting real. It happens to me all the time in conversation, and I try to give a little space for these sorts of insights when I write.

In other places, such as “Magic Lessons,” the long lines were an attempt to instill a frantic undercurrent to the poem—though the form is tight, it was a stressful time, so something should reflect that! Beyond that, because the poem deals with magic, the lines are written as a sort of incantation or spell. Ultimately, it’s a spell of self-protection and survival.

RT: The closing poem in Shapeshifters is a similar type of spell. In it, you have Cinderella write in her diary, “I killed / my first stepmom but you all // have me clap with songbirds / and cry.” To what extent do you see Shapeshifters as a response to the popular narratives around women’s trauma? In what ways were you trying to tell that story differently here?

DV: The thing about Cinderella is that in some versions of the archetypal story, she does kill her stepmother or even her mother. In others, she flees from advances from her father. Cinderella is afforded more agency in these tales than in most modern retellings.

In the same way that I was sick of my repeating Sad Person poems, I think I was tired of a lifetime of hearing sanitized frail damsel stories. I grew up with Disney and the Bible as a kid, and then I came of age during a time when the damsel was replaced by a stoic “tough chick” trope—a plucky girl who could punch her way through any foe. Essentially, both of these tropes can be summed up as Victims or Survivors. But in either case, these identities comprise ways in which we are totally defined by what happened to us. I don’t think either label suits me. I don’t see myself as a victim or as a survivor. A traumatic event that happened to me is just a thread in a much larger tapestry. I’m not that thread, and nor am I the tapestry. I’m the weaver. I think I wanted to speak to different possibilities.

RT: Beautifully put. Another major part of your “tapestry” is your Métis identity. In “No Buffalos,” you write about your mother, who only at age 40 rediscovered your family’s ancestry (her great-uncle Donald Ross was a member of Louis Riel’s Exovedate and was killed on the final day of fighting at Batoche). You note that despite her lineage and commitment to teaching Métis culture and history, she was still questioned for not having “lived Métis experience.” “Who counts and who decides?” you ask near the end of the poem, “We all have stories, we’re all legitimate.” Can you talk a little about your journey to that last statement?

DV: Being Métis is wonderful. Because of the work my mom does, I’ve been able to embody this truth earlier in life than she had a chance to. She got me involved in jigging when I was a child, and because she became a cultural presenter, I grew up with access to a lot of artifacts and stories.

Still, I have struggled with feelings of displacement. My grandmother was born in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, but my mom was born in Hay River, Northwest Territories. My parents met in Edmonton and then moved to my dad’s birthplace, Québec City, which is where I was born. We moved to B.C. when I was nine. There’s been a pervasive feeling of rootlessness threaded through my life, and part of that had contributed to a sense that perhaps I didn’t belong anywhere or to anyone. My family is scattered, and I will always be a guest on Snuneymuxw territory, where I currently reside.

I’ve long had the sense that being Métis isn’t a checkbox we tick off, nor does it end with the knowledge of Métis ancestry. Being Métis is an ongoing process: a way of seeing, being, knowing and connecting. Being in relation with other Métis people helped me see this, and made me realize the validity of my own experience. It echoed the experiences of others, and was in some places distinct.

When I started to live that from my heart, I stopped wondering whether I was Métis “enough.” I work with what I have, I create and maintain relationships wherever I can, and I endeavour to know more, but not because I’m striving to be anyone’s ideal Métis—whatever that is—but because my heart is calling out for it.

RT: While you were rooting yourself in your family’s Métis heritage, did a similar process play out for you in literature? While reading Shapeshifters, two other Métis poets kept coming to mind: in your mix of formal considerations and Métis history, your poems reminded me of Marilyn Dumont‘s work (especially poems like her sestina “Fiddle Bids Us”), and in your humour and efforts to reconnect to a broken chain of ancestry, they reminded me of Molly Cross-Blanchard‘s poems, such as “First-Time Smudge.”

Those are quite likely just my readerly associations, of course, and you have entirely different ones! “I am also in the broth,” you write in one poem about Métis belonging. Could you talk about the literary broth you see yourself a part of?

DV: Those are great picks. While writing “No Buffalos,” I still mired in self-doubt and was constantly afraid to offend or to get things wrong. I worried that I had no right to speak on any form of Métis experiences, even though I was exploring my own stories. It helped immeasurably to read Indigenous writers like Marilyn Dumont, Louise Bernice Halfe – Skydancer, Daniel David Moses, Gregory Scofield and Lee Maracle for questions of perspective, form, and language.

Writers like Molly Cross-Blanchard, Jónína Kirton, Selina Boan, Jordan Abel and Joshua Whitehead have helped orient me whenever I’ve felt isolated in my explorations. I’m grateful to be able to read so many funny, brilliant, generous, and surprising Indigenous writers. It’s a great time to be reading and writing.

RT: Keeping with Dumont for a minute, like you she had the experience of discovering in her youth that she was related to a prominent Métis leader (in her case, Gabriel Dumont). She waited until her fourth book, The Pemmican Eaters, published twenty years after her debut, to write in detail about that connection. Of this delay, she wrote that her journey to understanding her family’s past “was a lengthy process of historical enquiry and gradual acceptance,” and that perhaps “loyalty to my mother was part of the reason for not writing about Gabriel Dumont before now.” To what extent does Dumont’s slow journey through divided loyalties resonate with your own experience?

DV: I actually see this articulation as a kind of foreshadowing for myself. There are bits and pieces of my personal experience and of my family’s histories (on both sides) that I haven’t explored. I feel the histories still unfolding within me in my day-to-day life, and I’m trusting their timing to float up and be written. I think stories have a say in when they want to be told.

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Délani Valin is neurodivergent and Métis with Nehiyaw, Saulteaux, French-Canadian, and Czech ancestry. She studies for her master’s in professional communications at Royal Roads University, and has a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Vancouver Island University. Her poetry has been awarded The Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize and subTerrain’s Lush Triumphant Award. She is on the editorial board of Room and The Malahat Review, and lives on traditional and unceded Snuneymuxw territory (Nanaimo, BC).

On Display in my Mind: An Interview with Nick Thran

 

A John Ashbery Remembrance Day

A call came into the shop from someone looking for your Girls on the Run.

We didn’t have the book.

Could not have been expected to have the book.

But I offered to order the hardcover edition, which was still in print,

also suggested Notes from the Air, 

and one of the Library of America collected volumes

which would include Girls on the Run in its entirety,

providing the customer with more of the work for a small mark-up in

price.

The t-shirt I was wearing had a crude drawing of your face—a gift that my

wife had ordered online.

The poppy on my sweater looked pinned to your hair.

I didn’t tell the customer I was wearing the shirt.

Instead I write it here,

just a little bit high on the feeling of being of use.

 

from If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display
(Nightwood Editions, 2023).
Reprinted with permission

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Nick Thran is the author of three acclaimed collections of poems, including Earworm, which won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. After stops in Toronto, Victoria, New York, Calgary, Madrid and Montreal, Thran now lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Wolastoqiyik, where, in addition to writing, he works as an editor and bookseller. His new collection of essays, stories, and poems, If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display, was published in Spring 2023 by Nightwood Editions.

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Rob Taylor: The back jacket copy of If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display bills it as “a volume of essays, stories and poems… on a life of reading, writing and bookselling.” And yet, smack in the middle we find “Collected Trout,” a 24-page essay on Calgary’s Old Trout Puppet Workshop. Like in a wide-ranging display at a bookstore, your reader is left to make the connections between this disparate part and the others. A few other pieces, too, seem only loosely tethered to the book’s central concerns. 

“I love making the themed / (albeit only broadly associative) tabletop / displays,” you write in an early poem in the book. Later, you refer to this type of curation as “a form of poetry.” Could you talk about your approach to the curation of this book, which ranges so widely in both form and content? 

Nick Thran: I find I am focused, energized, and un-self-conscious when I’m gathering books together for display. One afternoon, immersed in this activity, I paused, looked out the window, and thought to myself, this feels so good. Then I began to think about display-making in the context of the writing I’d been doing over the last few years. 

After Mayor Snow, I wanted to write a book that didn’t rely too heavily on well-paved neural pathways towards anxiety and fear. Those things could be there in the new work, would be there, because that’s a part of my makeup. But the central mode of the new book, whatever it looked like, would be that E.M. Forster quote from Howards End “Only connect!” I also wanted to stay with things longer than I was in a lot of my poems. I liked the challenge of extending looks, in prose, while also accommodating diversions, digressions, associative thought. 

But I’d hit a wall in a book of essays I was working on. The essays I’d already written were interesting to me. A lot of them, “Collected Trout” included, are in this book. But I’d developed an impossible set of constraints for myself. I was also running into that difficulty most every non-fiction writer, writing about the work of others, runs into: am I really the person to be speaking on behalf of some of the artists I’m writing about? Especially if I’m trying to make these essays, in some way, personal? Fiction gave me some freedom from those constraints, to remove the names, to veer off in wildly imaginative or speculative directions, but keep the essence.

RT: What inspired you to pursue fiction as a way to keep the essence of a true story?

NT: Fiction has, since I moved to Fredericton seven years ago, become a real companion. I especially like a lot of the sometimes sprawling, sometimes granular, lyric, multi-book series loosely termed “autofiction”– Knausgaard, Ferrante, Alexis, Bolaño, Cusk. The value of novels and story collections is more apparent to me now than at any point in my life, especially living a bit further away from the urban centres, especially navigating through middle age, especially staying engaged with the world throughout the pandemic. I think as public spaces shrink, and culture sometimes feels more clipped, visual, or algorithm-generated, it makes sense that a lot of readers are drawn to works where people get a chance to go on and on about the full scope their lives and the lives of those around them, whether fictionalized or not. 

One day I was reading this slim novel by Dionne Brand, Theory, when it clicked: fiction, that thin film over reality that gives us room to play with the ways that people relate. Then I spent a glorious three months just writing and editing story after story. All six that are in the book. 

In addition to relieving some of the self-made pressure of the essays, including short fiction added another element to the still-flowering idea that I could write a book that is also a display. Imaginary bookstores. Play with gender. Other points of view. 

RT: Did you have any similar influences that inspired the essays-that-stayed-essays in the book?

NT: As soon as I decided I wanted the new collection to embody the pleasures and practice of book display-making, I started to think about writing an autobiographical essay about bookselling. I stumbled upon a book of essays by Vivian Gornick called Approaching Eye Level. WOW. I read five more of her books. Three of them, Approaching Eye Level, The Odd Woman and the City and Fierce Attachments, I’ve read at least three times each (they’re short). She reminded me, by the insightful hinges or explosions that seemed to occur from some of the briefest encounters, that there was no such thing as a “boring” subject. That the most niche or particular interest—decorating a window with books, for example—could be interesting if I was writing directly at what made it interesting to me. 

About Vivian Gornick I began to understand what my guitar teacher, Sebastian (who happens to be the teenage son of two friends of mine), means when he talks about his love of Bruce Cockburn: “He plays everything I want to play, exactly the way I want to play it.” Her work taught me how I might transfer some of what I knew worked in a poem into prose, at the sentence, paragraph, and overall structural levels. Many other writers of prose have influenced this book. But I hadn’t felt this mix of affinity for a voice along with a MAJOR CRAFT LESSON since the poems of Yusef Komunyakaa first showed me how to write a poem. 

RT: What did Komunyakaa show you? (He asks, as a poet who still has no clue how to write a poem.)

NT: In 1999, the year I got my mitts on his Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems, I was immediately moved by how the variety of settings in the poems—Louisiana, Vietnam, Harlem, etc.—felt joined in the music of the lines, and in the kinds of details that he brought to the fore (often brief, tender details, like the woman “brushing a boy’s hair” in the black glass of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial). 

I drew from how he experimented with different masks, different voices. I liked his then-burgeoning insistence on drawing lines between the contemporary and the mythical, even when those lines went through inhospitable places, or traumatic experiences. I admired how he wrote, musically, about his love of music. 

At the beginning of my writing life, I thought that poetry was elevated thought, or feelings distilled to inarguable truths. But in Komunyakaa’s poems, such as “The Dog Act,” it seemed like “Contradiction, the old barker / drunk again on these lights / & camaraderie” was the mode. The speakers in his poems seemed to strive for meaning and self-loathe in equal measure (something I could identify with at the time). 

And in terms of a craft lesson, just look, in those quoted lines, at the way “& camaraderie” takes on the properties of the “these lights,” all those “a”s blinking, rhythmically, visually, between the consonants. It’s the kind of intricate wiring that one could work towards learning. You didn’t just have to magically BE some precocious (and probably insufferable) Rimbaudian character.   

RT: I love the thought of Brand, Gornick and Komunyakaa all nudging you forward in their various ways, perhaps arguing a bit between one another but ultimately collaborating. When did you decide to bring it all together—stories, essays, poems—in one book? 

NT: I had been reading a lot of what you might call “unclassifiable books.” I was interested in work that swerved away from expected narratives, that used collage techniques, mixed fiction with non-fiction, that were hard to catalogue. And I’d always had it in my mind that I’d like to try a book of lyric prose.   

So, finally, I had the drive and the tools. I was writing a book of poems at the time, too. But to be honest, most of the poems I’d been writing—not all, but most—were boring me to tears. Now, poems that I thought were worthwhile began to bubble up from the sludge of my poetry files, and seemed fresher when set next to the prose pieces. The poems had context; they did some things the prose couldn’t do. Putting the book together started to feel like my Sunday afternoon display-making at the store. Metaphors of the forest and the city started to flirt with one another. I was in that good, creative place again, saying the things that I wanted to say, in the ways I wanted to say them. 

RT: Thinking of Brand, Gornick and Komunyakaa encouraging you along brings me back to your puppet workshop essay. The associative connection the essay sparked for me was a writer’s longing for the intimacy and intensity of being part of a creative team. Writers sometimes near such relationships—while taking workshop courses, working with editors, haranguing fellow writers with interview questions, etc.—but we largely live solitary lives. Does “Collected Trout” offer us a window into your desire for an alternate creative life you wish you could access? In the book’s titular essay, you describe Book City Bloor West Village as “A bookstore, but a kind of workshop too.” Have you been able to find that alternate life, in some way, in bookstores?

NT: I think there are two general locations in If It Gets Quiet…, the bookstore and the workshop. The tabletop or window display is a theatrical display, too. Also, a kind of pond. It made sense to have a theatre company at work in the middle of the book, to set up a stage where a reader could learn about these puppeteers and watch them build their imaginary worlds. I wanted to write about people who took play, and their plays, seriously. When I arrived in Calgary for ten months of work in 2015, the primary thing that I wanted to do was to visit the Old Trout Puppet Workshop and talk with the puppeteers. I had a hunch I had something to learn from them. 

And yes, in hindsight, watching the Old Trouts work reminded me of the kind of magic I used to feel when me, Sue Sinclair, Kalpna Patel, Paul Vermeersch and others were all selling books together at the same store in Toronto. But the Trouts are entirely their own thing, and I wanted to honour that in the work. “Collected Trout” provides journalistic counterweight to the autobiographical elements of other essays and poems. I didn’t want to strain to connect that piece to the profile of the book, or to the sales pitch on the back cover. 

RT: Near the end of the puppet workshop essay you write, of living and creating beside the Rocky Mountains, “One may see the enormity and potential of oneself, but also the poverty of one’s own material, one’s absolute smallness.” Do you feel some equivalent to this when working in a bookstore, surrounded by towers of words? To what extent does it daunt you? Inspire you?

NT: Bookstores only inspire me. They are my safe, happy place. I feel energized by the impossibility of being able to read everything; it calms me down. And it makes sense to me, both as a reader and as a writer, that someone would buy, say, a copy of Alejandro Zambra’s The Private Life of Trees, or Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms, instead of the book we’re talking about now. 

Watching people make their book choices is something that helps me, at a fundamental level, see other people. It’s the place where reality, fantasy, commerce, etc. don’t always feel at odds with one another. I mean, we can talk about who owns these bookstores, what is or isn’t on the shelves, and who can afford to buy books. These conversations are important and ongoing, and I hope I gesture towards some of them in this collection. But ongoing, too, is the small talk, the idle browsing, the unexpected conversations that happen in bookstores. That’s where my jam jar is. 

RT: One of the most moving pieces in the book is “Notes on a Version of The Waste Land,” a “fictionalized essay” about poet and TS Eliot translator Fernando Vargas, who you worked with as a Creative Writing instructor while he was a patient at Coler-Goldwater Hospital in New York City. In the story, Vargas’ living quarters, a shared hospital room with little space for his books and writing, is a constant source of anxiety in his writing life. What did that experience teach you about the importance of the physical spaces in which you read, acquire, and write literature? 

NT: I hadn’t thought about that essay so much in terms of the anxiety over physical space, it being so concerned with mental health or interior spaces. You’re right, that physicality is central. And to be in a space where you can’t keep more than a few books, that’d be anxiety-producing for anyone who loves to read. 

“Notes on a Version…” is the oldest piece in the book. I think that the experience of working with Fernando drove home the rather obvious point that creativity, and creative people, exist everywhere, and that the degree to which we can engage in our creativity is contingent upon a variety of factors, many of which need to change and should change, and some of which are beyond our control. He and I managed to make a space; we were two people at a table talking about books and poems with one another. We made a connection, too. I didn’t want to let that connection just slip into memory. I also wanted people to know a bit of his brilliance, even if his circumstances were not great.  

More generally: any book with its nose too deep into places which are, let’s face it, often white-owned, and in neighbourhoods that have pushed low-income families out to make room for what can sometimes feel like a bourgeois or boutique experience, is not going to succeed as being a book for more than a certain kind of reader. I wanted to set pieces in hospitals, in industrial areas, on the clearcut sides of the mountain, to articulate that the experience of working in a small bookstore can be grafted onto other kinds of experiences, jobs and practices.

RT: The range of people, places and subjects in this book is one of its great delights. While the book centres the worlds of booksellers and writers, you also explore the lives and works of many other types of artists, including painters, architects and, of course, puppeteers. 

Poems about, and in response to, music and paintings have appeared in all your poetry collections. Could you talk about this interest of yours? Does a consideration of these other arts allow you to get at something—about art, about life—that is more difficult to access if you focus on writing alone?

NT: A previous book of mine once received what I think was a criticism, something about not being sure where the influence of a particular writer ended, and my own voice began. I think about this a lot. In some respects, I want my work to have a shape distinct from the other shapes. But as is probably evident at this point of the interview, I am easily influenced by the work of others. And many times, this ease I have in relating to the work of other people, in a variety of genres or practices, feels like a strength, a way in which I am comfortable being social, with sharing ideas, seeing similarities in structures, and giving praise where praise is due. I know this capacity helps me as an editor and as a bookseller. As a writer, I’m usually less sure. 

But I don’t see the engagement with other art forms in my poems as an interest, really. It’s just my life. Maybe it has to do with trying to rid oneself of the ego, of the preciousness that can sometimes accompany one’s identity as it relates to a singular art form. I think it’s important to think about the metaphor of an artistic diversity, like a biodiversity, as something that has the potential to save and sustain life. It never has made sense to me why anyone would impose a hierarchy of value upon, or a border between, an episode of Succession, an album by Frank Ocean, a quilt by Anna Torma, and a poem by Sarah Holland-Batt. And it has never made sense to me why I wouldn’t write about the ways any other person or group’s work has burrowed itself into my own consciousness, into my own point of view and practice. 

RT: Your ease with influence is a strength, Nick! Very much so. Another strength of yours is your endings: one of my favourite things about reading short fiction written by poets is how, and where, they wrap things up. Writing poems feel like the ultimate training ground for honing beginnings and endings—poems, especially short ones, being largely composed of these two elements. How did your years of writing poems inform your approach to writing endings in fiction? 

NT: We seem to talk a lot in our culture about a poet’s first poems and about a poet’s last poems. I do think poetry is fertile ground for beginnings and endings, as you say. 

It has been harder for me to write poems in the middle of my life. When they do come, I am grateful. And I admire poets who seem to find the clearest articulations of their life-long projects somewhere in their middle poems. What an important thing, for a reader who also writes, to see others finding their ways through the middle. It’s not easy. Finding one’s way through the middle is, I think, another theme to this book.

How this beginning and ending relates to writing short fiction, I’m not sure. I don’t know that I’ve written enough fiction to have a sense. In terms of the stories that are in this collection: maybe as a poet I have a trained willingness to end abruptly, to not fill in too much or to over-explain. I think it’s Deborah Eisenberg who talks somewhere about short fiction being like having just a couple of holes in the fence between you and your neighbour. I like that sense of the short story as a fragment gesturing towards the unseen whole of another person’s life. That’s textbook poetry stuff too, is it not? “Petals on a wet black bough,” etc.

RT: Before we wrap up, the big question: If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display arrives at your book store. Where do you shelve it? Where would you hope to spot it if you entered another bookstore?

NT: Right now, there’s one in the window, a stack on the new release table, a couple copies in poetry and a couple in biography. When the launch is over, I’ll probably let my colleagues decide. Maybe we’ll crunch the numbers and see, if it moves at all, from which section it more readily moves.  

As for other bookstores: my sister recently sent me a picture of my two nieces in Munro’s Books in Victoria. They were excited to see their uncle’s book in the store, and on display. It was in essays, face out on a wall of plastic brackets, underneath a new edition of Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet. First I grilled my sister over text, you guys didn’t put it there? You just found it like that, near the Carson? Nope, she said. That’s just where it was. And so that’s where it will remain on display in my mind—with my smiling nieces, near one of the early books by one of my favourite authors, in the first bookstore that made the mystery of literature feel accessible to me.